The Business of IT In a Cloud Era

Times are changing; cloud-based technologies (public, private or hybrid) are sweeping the world of IT. The pace of change is fast and furious.  Every other day we do hear of some new service or technology being rolled-out and, as the famous saying goes, change is inevitable.  Changes to  IT departments, System Integrators and IT consulting companies are massive and paradigms are being changed.

Much less focus on infrastructure builds or technology roll-outs and far more focus on business goals, and delivery of results to the business.

Focus on pervasive analytics

Today’s businesses do have a lot of data to handle, in fact it maybe more than they realize. Most of these important data whether structured or unstructured normally go unused since they are not accounted for. The challenge for today’s business is to make the data easily digestible to its users.   The Business of IT has shifted from managing infrastructures to helping simplifying access to the data, so it can be easily accessed and analyzed whenever and wherever by users.
Major focus on data security, tracking and tracing

Control of data is shifting. These days, large chunks of data in organizations do fall outside the IT department, and as a result provisioning and tracking of access controls is key to data security.    The biggest threats to data breaches is normally internal users, be it maliciously or accidentally. There is a major focus on enhancing data security and tracing its path of flow for easy accountability.

Centralized and reduced responsibilities

IT departments have traditionally have the responsibility of keeping their respective organizations and clients’ technology running smoothly.   This responsibility has completely shifted to technology and services providers.   Consider any SaaS (software as a Service), IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) or PaaS (Platform as a service provider.     Contractually they are now having to provide levels of service that would be cost prohibited in the past.

Continuous improvement

One of the most common complaints about IT departments is that they are slow moving.   Slow at adopting new technologies, or rolling out updates to existing ones.    The long cycles can usually be tracked to internal resource, or budgetary, constraints within organizations, which have not been able to keep up with the many systems they maintain. Today, a lot of technology being introduced require very little or no supervision at all.   The focus is on business value and feature sets, and not on the rollout process.
The new models in technology management has brought a lot of changes that has shifted the focus of IT as a Business.  Small and large IT organizations, System Integrator and Technology Consulting Firms are having to adapt and change to the new models.